Sometimes I’m very much a geek — but not always.   I mean, most days I am content to twine my fingers around bundles of wires and peer deep within the souls of servers, let code flicker past my knowing eyes in a complex dance of purpose, and find myself with a half chubby from hearing hard drives spin up.    I cannot and will not deny that spirit of being “one with the Matrix” on a daily basis.   But there are occasions, like today, when I prefer to don another hat and assume a different nature.   Today I communed with my cars.

Out of all the current aspects of my life, my current vehicular situation is one that I’m rather satisfied with at the moment.    Two cars, both new and running well, well within their respective warranties, reliable, and not without their elements of fun, subtle though it be sometimes.    They are not racecars, ricers, boytoys, or eccentric vehicles; as a family man, I don’t have the time nor the resources to be both practical and flamboyant, but they get me elements of both the stolid family man responsibility and the occasional grab-the-Jesus-bar experience.

They were also both horrifically in need of an oil change.

We’ve been waffling between the frozen, rockhard, 10-degree nights with ice and some snow to the “OMG, is spring here?” semi-warmth that only March can tease with and make us with we lived in California year-round.    As a result, this weekend’s bone-soothing warmths –  by no means hot; good god, not yet, dontcha know? — has rendered the ground into a combination of squidgy, sticky, sloppy mud sitting ontop of slabs of still-permafrost underlayment.    This thaws during the day enough to let your car dig ruts the size of the Grand Canyon in your driveway and then promptly freezes back into unflappable cement in the evening, causing your car to “pop” out of its parking spot when backing out in the morning.    It’s lovely, and if I have to put myself on the ground to change the oil?   EVEN BETTER.

And yet it was my best shot, the Galant being 8100 miles since it had last been changed and the Aveo about 5300; thank goodness for the quality of fully synthetic Mobil 1 oil which some folks run up to the mind-boggling count of 10,000 miles or more before giving it a switch.   If I had used dino excretion to lubricate my engines, I’m sure it would have rolled over and waggled its legs in the air long before now.

So, after digging out out the jack, the jackstands, the socket set (17mm for both cars, nicely enough), one oily cloth, one clean cloth, both jugs of new oil, both new oil filters, the oil catch pan, and a 4×8 sheet of glassboard to lay on, I started doing the mechanic thing on the cars.    Suffice it to say that the liquid dumping out of the bottom of each was no longer oil, it was FECES.    If it could have laid turds, it would have.    I can only imagine what was going through their electronic brains for the past week or two — “So….sluggy….tastes….like….burning!”    They ought to practically jump for joy now (and hopefully be a bit nicer on the gas mileage, too.)

After doing both and cleaning up, I decided to continue with my daily driver, the Aveo.    Gassed it up, dumped all the metric shitloads of crap from the passenger floor side, put away all the unnecessary items on the back seat, filled up the washer fluid, and took it down to the combination laundramat, car wash, and storage center and paid $1 for 10 minutes of Super-Suk Vacuum Madness.    Some Armor-All applied to the dusty dash, steering wheel, shifter, and brake; some glass cleaner applied to the extremely filthy windshield; and just because I’m a wannabe pimp daddy, tire shine on the pathetic 15″ tires with the shitty-looking plastic hubcaps.    No, Calvin is not pissing on something on my rear window, nor do I have nuts hanging from the rear of my car, but I have super-shiny tires.    You’re impressed, I can tell.

I love getting underneath my cars; checking out all the technology and how it works together has always been my passion, whether on computers or on women  (and I’ve seen a few undercarriages in my day, thankyouverymuch).   There’s something both serene and terrifying at looking at the components that, every day, help me fly down the road at speeds that make the Amish blush and shuffle uncomfortably in their buggies, yet still managing to deliver me in one piece and relatively happy at the other end of the trip.    I think if folks who are ignorant of how vehicles are constructed actually saw how very little holds it all together, they’d be a bit more nervous about doing some of the driving that they do.    It truly is amazing.

As I put everything away tonight and then washed my hands slowly under the warm, bubbly water, I reflected that it felt good to get a bit dirty, dig my fingers into something other than a software project, and I had really accomplished something.    That, in my opinion, is a good day with my cars.

“Move it or lose it!”  My parents used it a lot, and so do coaches.    The saying encourages you to drop the plow and get yourself in gear, to quit lollygagging around.    Now the new President wants to give folks a temporary pass on the DTV conversion, and I think that’s a terrible idea. Thankfully, a lot of other people think so as well; now to get the government to agree, without industry pressure.

President-elect Obama has now urged lawmakers to delay the transition to all-digital transmission of over-the-air (OTA) due to, from what pollsters say, nearly 8 million homes that have not “taken action” to upgrade their television sets or buy a digital converter.    The poll apparently also cites something on the order of nearly a fourth of Americans that believe the transition will require them to buy a new TV.   Proponents cite the lack of any more coupons for converter boxes and the lack of education of the masses.

I’m sorry, but there’s only so much you can do when a country-wide transition like this is coming up, because you’re speaking to a vastly intricate demographic, one that you’re never going to fully reach, even if you were to tattoo it on their forehead in fiery letters.    The fact is, a good portion of the people will never convert until they must because they have no other choice.

If you are too stupid, too lax, or too ignorant to have not noticed and understood the half a billion advertisements and PSAs that have littered the radio waves, papers, and TV commercials for the past year about this transition, said it in a million different ways, with multiple approaches to get attention, explain the transition, and inform, then I have no sympathy if February 17th comes and all you get is static instead of American Idol.

Frankly, I’m tired of seeing the notices.   I understood it the first time around.   The next 4,758 times was just wasting my life.    And how this transition is handled will set a huge precident for other technological changes that will come in the future — the switch to IPv6, changing to digital telephones, etc.

The coupon (or lack thereof) issue is something to address, but if you haven’t taken enough interest to sign up for one, then you probably get to buy one at full price.   They’re not THAT awful in cost, and it’s kinda like taxes — if you’re late, you pay a price.   That’s how it goes.

If I felt that not enough effort had been made, I’d think differently.   However, the government has done a good job on this one, the airwaves and media have been swamped with notices, and assistance has been offered.   For those still unmoving in the face of all this, I say:  Tough.

What do you think?   Are you already prepared for the transition and, if not, why not?   Do you think the schedule should be kept or the delay honored?   Shall we hit slackers over the head with a brick?

So, I’d been working on this big problem at my day job for a few days, banging my head against various and sundry keyboards, when I decided to send the code via wires to the large machine in the corner, whereupon it promptly spat out 15 thin pieces of flattened and dried tree innards with various conglomerations of a fused black polymer upon its surface. I grabbed these, trotted off to the throne for some “reading”, and found my bug within a few minutes.

What is it about reading things on paper that makes the experience so different?

I adore reading a newspaper, more for the experience of doing it than for the news itself. The slightly warming, musky scent of the newsprint, the crackle of the paper as you turn the pages, the way your eyes can drift around lazily searching for something to latch onto, the mild frustration at trying to find wherever page “A9″ ran off to — it’s an entire experience. I think for me, who has a very busy schedule most of the time, taking a few minutes to sit down and read an actual, physical paper represents either a) having the time to do so or b) making the time to do so. In college it was a great morning ritual to drink some 9-scoop coffee, read the paper, and wake up slowly. It represented a slower pace.

So, naturally, I haven’t read a physical paper in probably a year, if not longer.

I remember late nights in the Olin computer labs at Luther, listening to the “zzeeeep, zzzeeeeeeep” as ink was whacked onto a long roll, causing it to curl up and over the printer and back onto the floor to fan-fold into a neat stack. Usually this was the code for my talker (a type of chat room) which was about 10,000 lines long and would take quite awhile to print out. But once I had a project in front of me on solid deadtree, finding bugs, doing edits, and generally looking at the flow of the code was much, much easier.

I don’t do much programming on paper anymore, simply for the cost factor and for the way I program which is more interactive — make a change, see if it works, make another change — or because I do more visual programming (buttons, windows, etc.) that don’t show themselves very well in written code. But on occasion, it ends up being a handy tool to pull out of the case, dust off, and give a shot.

This is why I somewhat find the entire blogging phenomenon to be somewhat curious, because the nature of the beast practically prohibits it being printed on any sort of solid medium. (Although you can probably expect Dooce to bring out a book sometime entitled, “Months of Leta: My Child Grows Up in Blogs”.) Millions of wannabe writers out there (myself included) are whacking out entries in full digital format, never to be seen via an ink impression in their entire career.

Mind you, people have forever been reading news and magazine articles online, so it’s not a completely new form of journalism. However, you can just as easily read the Washington Post online as you can on paper, albeit a bit more updated, and yet they have a very healthy circulation of newsprint out there. There are still hundreds if not thousands of girls and boys, young and old, earning a few extra bucks by going around in the wee hours of the morning, flinging rolled-up missiles at doors, windows, and the occasional cat, so it’s clearly a healthy industry.

I wonder, then, would anyone subscribe to a printed-and-delivered “blog newspaper” that comes out daily and simply features syndicated postings from all the best bloggers out there today? It’d be like Ann Landers, but without the moronic questions and syrupy answers.

They might — just for the experience of paper.

Do any of you have a need for 68 CD-ROM drives?

How about 40 or so 3.5″ floppy drives?

28 modem cards? No? Damn.

My poor basement has found itself for the last few months to be the repository of a massive amount of computer equipment as I have gathered it from all corners of the globe, dumped it there, and promptly ignored it while life flew by me in a fit of fury. Two and a half tables of computer parts from the old Hampton Middle School, plus a load of computers from my day job, plus other random parts — all in jumbled piles in the middle room, barely enough space left to sashay by.

Now that my schedule has somewhat cleared up (not by my choosing) and with the Little One on the way, I decided it was high time to really attack the pile and thrash it into submission.

One of the big problems with collecting masses of computers is what to do with all of them. I got them all because the price was right, and parts are parts — they’re always good to have around. It has also been my experience that, unless you have great contacts and/or unlimited amounts of money, for computer collectors to find true treasures, you have to take a lot of trash, too.

And so, I’m left to dig through mountains of computers, monitors, keyboards, mice, cards, accessories, printers, and the like. You also can no longer throw anything with circuit boards or CRTs (picture tubes) in the trash; they figured out that the chemicals in them (like lead and mercury) aren’t terribly friendly to the environment and it gives Mother Nature a rash that, frankly, you don’t want the old girl to have.

The downside to that is that disposal of said nefarious objects usually costs a pretty fair cent at the dump, on the order of $13 per monitor and various other prices for other things. Unless they come with a hidden Benjamin in the disk drive, these things aren’t exactly money-makers.

So, I’m trying an experiment: I’m breaking down all the parts I want to get rid of into plastic, metal, and electronics. The metal I’m going to have my dad haul up to the metal recyclers, the plastic will go in the trash, and the electronics (now much smaller and compact than they were before) will be stockpiled until I find a good way to get rid of them without spending a billion dollars. It will, at any rate, give me much more room.

Some of this stuff will be eBayed, as is proper when there’s some value, but I’m building up a good stockpile first before starting into that as, once you do, it’s a constant workload to get done and shipped and out the door. eBay can be profitable but, like whoring, you have to strap on the fishnets and slap the stilettos up and down the street a few times before getting any cash.

Despite all the work involved, I am having some decent fun in finding out what I all got in my hauls. Half of taking on a haul is just shoving whatever boxes and cartons of stuff you have into your car, thanking the person you got them from, and getting the hell out of there. Much like The Gambler, you never count your money while you’re sitting at the table, there’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

So I have a few interesting pieces in the mess to drool over when I get some spare time (I’ll post pictures sometime sooner than later), but my mission is not to sit and fondle at this point, it’s to get the job done.

And doing it I am — I’m getting rid of a lot of the regular old PCs that I’ve been keeping over the years, finally realizing that although that 386 looks neat and has some interesting, old hardware in it, in reality it’s just an old, common computer and isn’t that remarkable. Much like the rock that looked really pretty when you saw it in the stream, once dried out it loses its luster. I’m making room for the REALLY interesting computers for once.

This is, of course, all an effort to get the swell under control before the Small Kicker arrives, so when I have some limited time to “play”, I can actually do something instead of wading through piles of parts and dangerously-leaning stacks of crap. I’d like to keep a bouncy seat down there, too, so the ankle biter can come along and geek out with Dad, but I’m not about to submit the fruit of my loins to possible injury by the Leaning Tower of PCs.

All in all, I’m getting some time into my computer room(s) and my collection, so I’m happy about that, and my wife is happy at the idea of being able to see all four walls again in those rooms. (Love you, babe!) After all, if diving into your collection doesn’t involve a little adventure, what’s the point, right?

Now….can I interest you in a few dozen power cables?

From the director that brought you, Holy Shit, It’s Only Wednesday and What in the Hell Did You Flush?, we bring you a new summer blockbuster hit that’s sure to please:

It’s Called Modern Communication Methods, Dumbass!

The Answering Machine

Around since 1904, this terribly handy device is still not understood by the masses of people that call my home phone. Our phone message is simple: “Nathan and Yolanda’s answering machine, leave a message.” We’re even being way obvious in our communication — yes, this is an answering machine, as if you had any reservations about the tinny recorded voice coming to you down the line. Yes, you should leave a message. When? Well, there’s this little beep thing — well, most of you have heard this before, haven’t you? You know what to do.

The problem is — you fuckers haven’t figured it out! The damned devices have been around for over 103 years (that’s 1,236 months for you parents out there) and you still don’t know what to do when you call one! So, as a review, here’s what NOT to do when speaking to an answering machine:

1. Leave. A. Damned. Message. Do not hang up without leaving a message. Nothing will make me want to come over to your house and hit you over the head with a brick as much as simply not saying anything. You obviously called for a reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered, right? Feel free to say, “Was looking for you, wanted to know if you wanted to do lunch, guess you’re not home.” or something similarily trite, but leave a damned message.
2. Leave a GOOD Message - Saying, “Wanted to talk to you about something, will try to get ahold of you later” is only going to make me hate you more.   You left a message — a good start — but it was just as though you didn’t, because it didn’t TELL me anything.   Is it urgent?   Trivial?   What’s the real meaning here?   Give me SOME indication as to your intentions so I have a thought as to whether I should call you back today or next week or NEVER.
3. I’m Not Home – Do not act as if we are standing there, watching the light blink on the machine, and listening to you talk. While this may be true on occasion, 99% of the time we aren’t there. Saying, “Hello? Are you there? Hel-looooo????” and then waiting like a moron wastes our time and yours and only makes me less apt to return your call. If you’ve reached the machine, act like we’re not there and professionally leave your message.
4. Keep It Really Short - Do not waste the first 5 minutes talking about the weather, your dog, or saying, “uhm”, unless you are specifically calling for one of those particular reasons. While the days of a tape-based answering machine are long gone, my time is still precious and if the message is rambling, I’m very likely to simply wander off while it’s playing back or weep while standing there and my soul drains out of my ears. Know what you are calling for and leave a concise message about it. Whereas phone conversations may very well ramble, answering machine messages should be short, sweet, and to the point. If you think you’re being short and blunt, you’re probably not short enough. 30 seconds or less, preferably 15 seconds, should be all the time you need to leave your point. Anything more is killing me.
5. Digits, Please – State your name at the beginning of EVERY phone call. If this is the first time you’ve called or you do not talk to us on a regular basis (meaning: weekly), leave your phone number, too. Do not assume that I will automatically recognize your name or have your number in my records. I do have Caller ID, so there’s a darn good chance that I have your information anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to double-up on that. Stating it at the beginning of the call means that if I miss it the first time around (or forget to write it down right away), I can still replay the message and don’t have to listen to your entire Butt-Scorcher chili recipe before getting what I need. People’s voices (if you haven’t noticed) are distorted on the phone — don’t assume that I’m buddy-buddy with the Psychic Friends Network

One last point — if I hear one more person say, “Well, I just don’t like talking to answering machines, they’re so impersonal,” I’m going to drag them by the hair out into the woods and staple them to an elm upside down with their head in a vat of freezing-cold tapioca. Get over yourself. You’re not so special to talk to that I’m going to say, “Gosh, I’m sure glad she didn’t leave a message, I’d much rather talk to her on the phone.” The more likely scenario is that I’m standing in my kitchen, screaming obscenities at the answering machine because you have, yet again, refused to leave a message and let me know why you called. However, here’s a more important point: If you do not leave a message, I will not call you back. I refuse to play such games — no message, no call, end of story.

Email

Even worse than the answering machine is how email is still being abused by the hundreds of users out there that haven’t figured it out. I could go on and on about various aspects of writing emails, clarity, brevity, proper form, etc., but others have covered these subjects and it still doesn’t cover the one point that I want to bring up:

If you have email, you must check it at least once per day. This is mandatory.

Like it or not, email is a modern means of communication between people. Those in almost every business setting use it daily to transmit many important messages between colleagues. Teenagers use it to transmit…well…giggles between each other.

If you do not check your email at least daily, you are being horribly and unforgivably rude. Notice I didn’t say answer your email — I never said that had to be done daily, and can’t blame you if some messages take time to reply to. However, if you do not check it, you won’t know that something important has come in, and that’s where you’re being a snob.

“Well, I don’t check it often because all I get is junk.” Tough titties, little kitty. I get over 300 spam emails per day and you don’t hear me weeping about it. The fact is, email is like postal mail in some ways. You might get only magazines for days on end, but eventually you’re going to get that check or prize winning certificate or summons to appear in court — those sorts of messages you don’t want to miss and you’re glad you checked the mail regularly.

Email is the same way — if I know you have it, then I very well may use it to send you some important information. If you don’t check it, then you have no idea that time-sensitive correspondence came in, and you’re being a royal prick.

In Conclusion, Such As That Is

To avoid being labeled as a pain in my ass, please kindly do the following:

• Use an answering machine properly.
• Check your email.

It’s not hard, really, and will save me a lot of headache and angst in the future, and my poor walls which are starting to look awfully dented from all the banging of my head.

Thanks…and have a great day, suckka.